From Stolen Valor by B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley

 

Grisly Souvenirs

 

…but that was not the first time the American military had to address the issue. That occurred twenty-five years earlier in September 1942, when a directive from the commander-in-chief of the U.S. fleet in the Pacific pro­hibited the taking of body parts as war souvenirs. Customs agents during World War II routinely asked if travelers entering the U.S. were bringing in items such as bones. In April 1943, the Baltimore Sun ran a story about a woman who asked American officials to allow her son, a soldier in the Pacific, to send her an ear he had severed from the head of a Japanese sol­dier.

 

One World War II American sniper company, raising "souvenir-taking" to psychological warfare, was known for scalping their German victims. Such things weren't limited to the European theater. In a memoir called With the Old Breed, World War II veteran E.B. Sledge describes two bitter Pacific campaigns, that of Peleliu and Okinawa. He told of a Marine using his Kabar knife to wrench the gold teeth from a helplessly wounded Japanese. "Because the Japanese was kicking his feet and thrashing about, the knifepoint glanced off the tooth and sank into the victim's mouth," Sledge wrote. "The Marine cursed and cut his cheeks open from ear to ear." Such an atrocity would have gotten you crucified in Vietnam.

 

A number of books about Vietnam tell of mistreatment of prisoners by American troops as if this was routine behavior. Mistreatment of pows happened in Vietnam, as it certainly does in all wars. The brutality of war makes it difficult for combatants to turn off their anger and aggression even though enemy soldiers have been stripped of their weapons.

 

In a World War II novel called Winds of War, author Herman Wouk told the story of an American submarine commander who sinks a Japanese ship, then has the survivors machine-gunned. Most Americans took this as a piece of fiction in which Wouk was taking literary license. We all know Americans didn't do such things.

 

But several such incidents actually happened. After a Japanese convoy was sunk in the Bismarck Sea in 1943, American and Australian aircraft strafed the survivors in lifeboats or clinging to wreckage.

 

Lt. Cmdr. "Mush" Morton, one of the icons of the Submarine Corps, was an old, experienced hand by the time of Pearl Harbor. In January 1943, Morton was the commander of the USS Wahoo when the vessel single­handedly sank a four-ship Japanese convoy. One of the first two ships that went down was a troop transport; the others were supply ships. Such ves­sels often carried civilian laborers and captured prisoners. When the ships went down went down, troops and passengers ended up in the water, frantically swim­ming in search of life rafts and anything else that would float. "There must be ten thousand of them," one of Morton's officers said.

 

Morton gave orders, and crewmen with small arms and the deck guns of the Wahoo proceeded for over an hour to shoot at the life rafts and people struggling in the water. Under the circumstances, sailors could not distin­guish a soldier from a civilian, a woman or child from a soldier, or even a Japanese from a Korean slave laborer. Hundreds of people died indiscrimi­nately in the hail of gunfire from the Wahoo.

 

For this infamous action, instead of facing a war crime tribunal, Morton won wild acclaim from military authorities. The Wahoo incident merits only oblique mention in most books about Morton. Had Morton been German, I have no doubt that at the end of the war the Navy commander would have been tried as a war criminal. If the commander of a Navy ship had done the same thing during the Vietnam War, he would have been charged with genocide, and director Oliver Stone would have made a movie called The Wahoo Incident. But the battlecry in the Pacific was, "Kill Japs!" and Morton was duly awarded the Navy Cross as well as the Army's Distinguished Service Cross.

 

An investigation ordered by Eisenhower into mistreatment of paws in the European Theater indicated a number of violations of the Geneva Convention by American troops. Problems with strong-arming paws during interrogation and pilfering their personal property were so preva­lent in the 9th Infantry Division that orders prohibiting such behavior were issued on four separate occasions.

 

What came to be known as the Webling incident occurred on April 29, 1945. A platoon of Americans with the 222nd Infantry Regiment, 42nd Infantry Division, entered a small farm hamlet inside Germany a few miles north of the concentration camp of Dachau. The American soldiers took forty-three German troopers prisoner and shot them to death.

 

After the liberation of Dachau, 122 German soldiers surrendered to the Americans. A few members of an American squad delegated to guard duty began cursing at the German paws until all the Americans were chanting, "Kill 'em, kill 'em!" Enraged, a GI named "Smitty" grabbed his machine gun and let off a long burst at the German prisoners who were standing unarmed with their hands over their heads. As bodies fell, Smitty continued to shoot.

 

"Stop that crazy bastard!" shouted Col. Robert Wiley, who charged into the scene. As Smitty let go with a final burst, Wiley kicked him in the head to push him away from the machine-gun. But Wiley was too late. All 122 pows were dead. The incident was hushed up. Charges filed by the division commander against Smitty and the platoon were dropped. Nazi war criminals were being tried for crimes against humanity, and nobody wanted to mention American breaches of the rules of war.

 

A final example to show that brutalization of enemy prisoners occurs in all armies: In Israel, the military enjoys a lofty status as "morally superior" to other armies. It lives by the slogan "purity of arms" -meaning they do not murder, rape, or plunder. To suggest that Israeli soldiers might be other than heroic borders on blasphemy. But in 1995, Israel's foreign ministry launched an investigation after a retired Israeli general claimed that during the 1956 Sinai campaign, he and other Israeli soldiers killed forty-nine Egyptian prisoners.

 

That revelation was followed by allegations that during the 1967 Middle East War, the Israeli army's elite Shaked infantry unit took three hundred Egyptian prisoners at El Arish in the Sinai and shot them. "In effect, in a matter of hours, the whole Egyptian force was liquidated," Israeli historian Arieh Titzhaki said on national radio. The unit was under the command of Lt. Col. Binyamin Ben Eliezer, who later became housing minister.

 

The stories of Israeli atrocities provoked a national debate. Military his­torians contended that military censors covered up the atrocities, abetted by a willing public that venerated the military and its "purity of arms" tra­dition, stated succinctly by David Ben Gurion, an Israeli pioneer. The Jews, he said, were a "virtuous people" who needed a "virtuous army," and a vir­tuous army "preserves purity of arms." Unfortunately, that tradition, even for the Israelis, is a myth.